Captured on film: A peek inside a stellar nursery

Scientists have understood the basic process of how stars form for a while, namely that they grow out of large clouds of gas and dust in space. Under the influence of gravity parts of these clouds will clump together and fall in on themselves.

But how, exactly, does this process occur? Until now scientists have had to infer details from single images. It’s a bit like trying to understand how an ice cream cone is made by showing a picture of a cow being milked.

As it takes 100,000 years for this star formation process to occur it’s not like scientists can observe the process over the course of a few nights.

But scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope, including Rice University astronomer Patrick Hartigan, have begun to stitch together time-lapse sequences of images to form videos.

Three epochs of a stellar jet. (Patrick Hartigan)

The astronomers describe the process in a new paper in Astrophysical Journal (see .pdf) in which they’ve captured some spectacular outflows and jets that occur during the formation of stars.

12 Responses

Hey! We don’t pay you to wax whimsical about the birth of stars! We pay you tell us when to evacuate Katy as a result of inclimate weather! What’s going on with the Hurricane Leon or Lester or whatever?!

Excellent Post, Eric. I saw Dr. Hartigan speak on this to a more technical crowd and it really is a pretty amazing result. There are lots of special issues in astronomy which make our jobs harder – one of them is the fact that we tend to sample a tiny portion of the life cycle for events which can last hundreds of millions of years or more. This work is tough to do, and by the way is impossible without HST. Too bad they’re trying to cancel the replacement, JWST (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope), which will save us all of, what one month in Iraq or Afghanistan?

When you consider that we could have funded SETI for a thousand years, funded NEAT/Spaceguard for a century, or built thirty Kecks (or launched the Space Shuttle twice) for what has been spent thus far on the JWST, is it really that good of a deal? We scientists have to learn to live within a budget. Telling Congress that something will cost $1.6 billion and then gradually raising the price to $8.7 billion is neither good science nor prudent fiscal management and it does more than kill your project; it makes it much harder for the next group of scientists to get their project funded as well.

JWST is a boondoggle for sure but at this point I say let them finish the darn thing. I’d love to see it working. Between that and the SLS designed by those crack engineers in congress all the small innovative projects are getting bled dry at NASA anyway.

When the heat is on zooming out to the bigger picture helps take our minds off off day to day problems. Beyond statistical extrapolations it sure would be interesting to know how many of the stars that have ever formed had planets whose conditions resulted in some form of life developing and would it be too much to ask to know what type of life that was. We can keep looking but chances of us ever actually knowing what the score is there are less than slim and none. Only ET knows for sure and as big as the universe is even he would only know a tiny fraction of the whole truth.

Zooming back down to the heat for a minute. After the 107’s and 105’s today’s 102 didn’t feel all that bad to me. I guess everything is relative or so Einstein said.

But the things like “bubbles” and “jets” are probably material that is being cast off from the actual contraction of the cloud into protostars. I wonder if “cast off” material really tells us much about the much larger scale processes going on inside the cloud.